"black babies were three times more likely to die if overseen by a white doctor"
really
REALLY
fucking really
@Fixed_Effects is the corresponding author and he may take this thread as my Correspondence
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suppose for a moment that this were actually true what do physical reality do you imagine might cause this outcome? what specific actions can you imagine all white doctors taking that no black doctors take that would *triple* infant mortality independent of everything else?
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stray intrusive thought 'average white doctor kills black babies at triple rate of black doctors' factoid a statistical error. average white doctor kills black babies at same rate. Racist Georg who delivers in a cave and eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not h
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generally when a model produces fantastical results you should feel good about discarding the model. and this is absolute insanity there are a million things that can go wrong in this kind of estimation and the approach used by the authors handles like . . . five of them
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this kind of cockup is the *norm* in reduced form microeconometrics it is remarkable only for being wildly unreasonable, and nevertheless making it through a paper-thin review process (by people whos careers are built on the same methods) because it produced the Correct result
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the authors are careful to run through a series of apotropaic tests to ensure that a few well-understood issues did not obtain in their model its thorough, people myself included spend years learning these Rituals its akin to making sure submarine screen doors are up to code
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if you complete the Ceremony it is extremely unlikely that anyone will bother observing that your results are absolutely cockamamie its econometrics-by-recipe "order the data in such a way, run all the standard tests, publish, gib tenure" no iota of reflection necessary
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This paper is so egregious that it knocked me awake If they'd claimed /using the same methods/ like "5% increase in mortality" I would have slept through it But--those methods would have been equally bad /had they produced a reasonable result/!
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I want to emphasize that in closing Everything is fucked and you don't usually see it because it's not egregious enough to break the surface but everything in social science is fucked. Don't succumb to Gell-Mann Amnesia just stop reading empirical papers. Ed Prescott was right.pic.twitter.com/g20u9dGCXE
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Replying to @eigenrobot
Did it say anywhere what the rate of white babies dying is with white or black doctors? That’s kind of the obvious statistic to compare, right?
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it's implicit in their estimated coefficients, but it's a little tricky because they're also looking at marginal effects but basically the base rates should be baked into the model correctly
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Replying to @eigenrobot
I mean, that seems too obviously relevant to any model-building to not discuss explicitly in the text. I didn’t read the whole paper yet, but it does seems surprising that concordance with the mother’s race is insignificant, if the explanation is race-based quality of care
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